Building Wealth for Building the Kingdom: A Financial Planning Guide for Latter-day Saint Families By Devin D. Thorpe

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Book Synopsis

Building Wealth for Building the Kingdom is a simple, practical guide to help Latter Day Saint families organize their personal financial plans to meet their unique goals.

Mormon families will appreciate the gospel-centered, scripture-based focus on putting tithing at the center of a financial plan. Building Wealth for Building the Kingdom will help prepare families to enjoy the benefits of their labor while simultaneously contributing to the growth of Church.

The book provides simple answers to questions like:

How much should I be saving each month for my son's mission?
How much should I be saving each month for my children's college education?
How can I save enough to be able to retire while I'm healthy enough to serve a mission?

Avoiding tips on pinching pennies, the book focuses on opportunities to save thousands or tens of thousands of dollars by making smart moves with big decisions, like home and car purchases.

Excerpt:

This book has been written for those Latter-day Saints (members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) who believe that it is more important to do good than to do well. That is to say, it is written for you because you believe it is more important to raise a good family, attend to your Church duties, send your children on missions and pay tithing than it is for you to accumulate wealth. You may, therefore, lack adequate financial planning. The objective of this book is to help you to prepare financially to render any service that you may be called to give.

Brigham Young best expressed what has become the theme for this book. He said, “If, by industrious habits and honorable dealings, you obtain thousands or millions, little or much, it is your duty to use all that is put in your possession, as judiciously as you have knowledge, to build up the Kingdom of God on the earth.”1
What Brigham Young suggests is something akin to consecration. The Church does not now require that we currently share all of our wealth directly with the Church or that we keep all things in common. Instead, we live a preparatory law of tithing and the payment of offerings. Beyond that, we give to the Church much of our free time. We save and invest our money to prepare our children to enter life as contributing members of the Church. We save and invest to send our children on missions and to serve missions ourselves.

This preparatory law is good preparation for living the higher law. So much of our time, talents and resources are already dedicated directly to building the kingdom that to go to the next step of fully consecrating our assets and income to the Lord should become relatively simple. It is not inappropriate to consider financial planning from the standpoint of preparing ourselves for living this higher law.
Self-reliance is a fundamental precept of our Latter-day religion. President Hinckley explained this concept in an interview with the BBC in 1995, saying:

We teach emphatically the importance of self-reliance, the importance of education, of equipping our people so they can earn a living; the importance of saving and being prudent in the management of their affairs; the importance of setting something aside, a reserve, to take care of their needs if there should come a rainy day in their lives. And it's amazing how many follow that teaching. That's basic with us.2

This desire for self-reliance, therefore, further defines who we are as Latter-day Saints and how we approach the task of financial planning. Our objective, therefore, is to be able to provide for ourselves and our family members all of the things we desire them to have—without reliance upon a government dole or help from the Church.

Although you may never have thought about it before, your perspective on financial planning is likely somewhat different than other people’s. The motivations you may have as a Latter-day Saint in accumulating wealth are likely associated with a desire to render service to others, to build up the Lord’s Kingdom, to prepare yourself to live the law of consecration and, finally, a desire to be self-reliant.